


Nobles

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: 19th Century, Gen, Nobles Holler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 19:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16204145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Everyone in the county’s raised up knowing just who the Crowders are, and not a soul left outside Nobles Holler who remembers Easter Sudie Jones.





	Nobles

**Author's Note:**

> This comes from thinking on reasons why, in Justified, the black community at Nobles Holler would take in battered white women. I’ve pulled names from the WPA Slave Narrative Project, and if you would like to read about actual incredible people, head [that](https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/) way. (Originally posted on tumblr.)

It starts with the Crowders. At least, that’s what folks say. Ain’t so surprising that they’d think so. Everyone in Harlan’s heard of the Crowders, after all. Everyone and their cousin knows the Crowders have violence in their veins, pluck their women like raspberries and smile with the blood running down their hands.

Everyone in the county’s raised up knowing just who the Crowders are, and not a soul left outside Nobles Holler who remembers Easter Sudie Jones. If you asked the men on patrol at the borders of the holler, they’d say Nobles was set down by Easter’s man, Forsee Limehouse, soon as word of emancipation—not that emancipation meant a damned thing in Kentucky, freedom only for women and men beyond Lincoln’s ken—came to the hills. If you made it further into the holler (but that ain’t likely, honey, looking as pale and as healthy as you do), and you maybe noticed Amelia Jones, rocking in the chair her great-grandson made her, and you maybe learned her name, and asked her who it was that had built this holler … well, Amelia don’t talk much, these days. But she knows, and her daughters know, her sisters and nieces and cousins and their girls—the women of Nobles Holler know that it was Easter who built it. They know that it was Easter who set down the borders their men guard, and it was Easter who put down her gun and let the first Crowder woman in.

(What, you thought there weren’t no Crowders in this story? You thought it would be that easy, to catch Amelia Jones’s eye, to listen at her knee and unweave fact from myth? Why, you’d have no story at all, then, you’d have nothing but the loom and a tangle of colored string.)

It’s Easter, who decides they’ll stay in Kentucky, the Joneses and the Limehouses, the Campbells and the Hendersons and the Wrights, half of ‘em still wearing surnames like scars from the whip. It’s Easter Sudie Jones, who rides a mule down into Harlan—not a man with her, nothing but the mule and the hands that kept her alive for over twenty years, her and her man and her people waiting back up the hill—and somehow convinces a Crowder to sell her guns. She offers to do his family’s wash. It takes him a year to remember Easter’s name. It takes him two to come to the border of Nobles Holler, his woman up the hill and Forsee Limehouse and George Campbell blocking Crowder’s path; it takes two years for him to regret selling Easter the guns.

“Let him kill her,” Forsee had muttered, the first time Easter had smuggled the Crowder woman out with the wash. Easter had some experience, by then, smuggling things into the hills. “What is it to us, whether she lives?”

Ain’t nobody left who recalls just what Easter replied. Amelia’s mother told her that Easter told Forsee he could go build his own holler, if he had a mind, only he’d be leaving his wife and the guns. Amelia’s mother said it was probably the guns that made Forsee Limehouse stay. Or perhaps it was Easter’s hands. Easter Sudie Jones could do anything with those hands, she told her daughter. Just you look around and see all that she did.

Or maybe it happened the way Cora Campbell told it to her nieces, reciting from the Bible neither she nor Easter could read, _And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me_. God shut Forsee right up, Cora declared, thunderous, and her nieces comprehended how Forsee must have felt.

Of course, that ain’t how it’s told to the white girls by their mamas, stories spun from split lips and broken bones and bruises they cover with cake-flour makeup they can buy at the store. The way they hear it, the Crowder woman ran and the folks at Nobles let her, and they been letting unfortunate women run up there to this day. The white girls can’t afford to wonder why, because wondering might pull the wrong thread, and they look at their mamas and know they’ll need the story to be true.

Nobody thinks of Easter Sudie Jones, her hands callused from centuries of surviving, from fields and from washing, hands harsh enough to bargain a man’s guns out from under him, hands gentle enough to pluck his raspberry wife out from under him without bruising her skin.

 _There’s a better world, a-coming after this one_ , Easter might have said to the Crowder woman, using the Crowders’ clean laundry to wipe away the blood. _But that ain’t no reason not to better the one we got_.

**Author's Note:**

> Cora Campbell quotes Matthew 25.


End file.
